21 Grams (2003)

By Christian Eltell

Critic Rating: 4/4 Stars

Special Film Review

21 Grams is the type of film that contains ordinary stories with conflicting people who come together due to unfortunate circumstances. However, the film’s non-linear form of storytelling (called hyperlink cinema) makes the picture more complex, erratic, and psychologically tragic. This picture is an exercise in experimentation, playing around with conventional film narratives. While I enjoyed this picture, it is an emotionally straining vehicle that forces spectators to experience the rawness of human nature. Along with Amores Perros and Babel in director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga’s Death Trilogy, 21 Grams is a picture that deals with the themes of dying, suffering, and loss.

The film is about the lives of three characters and their personal conflicts. Paul Rivers is a man who becomes gravely ill and is in need of a new heart. Jack Jordan is a man who has been in trouble with the law many times and turns to God for answers and forgiveness. Cristina Peck is a woman who becomes an alcoholic after losing her family in a car accident. All three characters are in perilous stages in their lives, and their tragic stories begin to collide when Cristina’s husband, Michael, and her two daughters are killed in a car accident caused by Jack, and Michael’s heart is used to keep Paul alive. Paul is initially presented as an individual in tremendous pain. He has his oxygen mask but uses cigarettes to ease his pain. Paul also tries to be happy with his wife Mary, but their relationship is constantly strained due to the lies they keep from each other. When Paul partially recovers due to Michael’s heart, he becomes like a private investigator who’s mostly invested in finding out who saved his life. Once Paul discovers the truth about Michael, Cristina, and the car accident from a useful contact, he feels pity, remorse, and guilt for being given a heart by a deceased individual. Due to this, Paul feels responsible for Cristina and becomes romantically close to her because they have both become lonely people with deep wounds. Paul gets close to Cristina without telling her the truth about Michael’s heart right away. He watches her swim and tells her she needs to eat or her kidneys will go bad. Since he’s a mathematician, he also says that it takes a lot of math for two people to meet. Paul is sincere and kind when he’s around Cristina and wants to comfort her as much as possible in order to help her recover from the depression she’s been going through. At first, Cristina is briefly viewed as a loving mother to her daughters. Then, when she finds out that her entire family has died, Cristina becomes an emotional wreck and an alcoholic, looking pale, tired, and lifeless, similar to the way Paul looked and felt when he suffered with his dying heart. When Paul tries to get close to Cristina during their first meetings, Cristina tries to resist and ignore any form of contact. However, she slowly becomes attracted to Paul and his slight sense of humor and pleasant personality. Once she discovers that Paul has Michael’s heart, she becomes outraged at first, but then feels bad that he has also been living with a burden like she has since her family’s death.

Jack Jordan is also a parent, like Cristina. He loves his wife and two kids, but he always runs into some kind of trouble that sets him back. Jack is the middle character who causes the film’s whole chain of events to collide because his car accident kills Cristina’s girls and Michael.  He also feels tremendous guilt for the consequences of his actions, and always takes responsibility because of his belief in God. Through the bible, Jack believes that he and everyone else can become better and redeemed by learning from past mistakes. Aside from religion, the love Jack has for his family is powerful, even though he may seem violent and seriously demanding, especially when his children hit each other, or when Jack tells a younger man that it’s important to believe in God because the Lord can give life and take it away (like in the case of Michael’s death, and Paul receiving his heart).

All three characters deal with struggles and challenges in death and suffering. However, the main conflict is questioning whether these characters will move forward in life, or suffer due to the depression and dilemmas they’ve all endured. As Arriaga mentions in his article, How I Wrote 21 Grams, his sad characters are formed in order for spectators to feel emotionally connected to them. Paul struggles with poor health issues, Cristina has alcohol and drug addictions due to family loss, and Jack is traumatized from prison time and abuse as a child. The representation of these working middle-class characters is not in terms of heroes and villains, or good versus evil, but raw human beings who all struggle through personal issues. Jack may be misconceived as a bad guy due to the fatal car accident, but he is a man trying to improve and liberate himself from painful anguish, the same as Paul and Cristina are under their circumstances. 

Arriaga also mentions that the protagonists in the film are mostly based on personal experience, observation, and imagination. Arriaga is the type of writer that likes to encapsulate his characters through the element of surprise, not so much research-based so that the story and the people in it can be felt and imagined. The writer asks himself how he would feel and act if he was like any of these emotional people. In the case of Paul Rivers, Arriaga did have a personal experience where he had a viral infection near his heart and envisioned how it would feel to be saved by someone else’s heart. Although Arriaga never used drugs or alcohol, he wrote Cristina in order to represent his greatest fear in life: for an individual to lose a loved one in a violent and devastating manner, causing that person to be imprisoned physically and emotionally. The writer says he has seen friends destroy themselves with dangerous and addictive substances due to depression and needs. In forming Jack’s character, Arriaga describes a late friend of his who found hope through religion in an attempt to eliminate the pain that was ruining his life. Ultimately, despite all the suffering, Arriaga believes that hope and love help people overcome death, loss, and depression. This is what happens in the film when all three protagonists are in the same room together. Paul ends up taking his own life so that not only he can escape his misery, but so Cristina to overcome her sadness by raising her new child, and so Jack to return home to his wife and kids. 21 Grams shows that people can overcome emotional experiences through interactions, “relating again with others, loving again, and not forgetting our lost ones” (Arriaga 51). Iñárritu, Arriaga, and the cast have developed a powerfully emotional experience that lingers in your soul for a lifetime.